Dr Fu Bingchang was the Republic of China’s Ambassador to the U.S.S.R between 1943-1949. He was also the late grandfather of Chinese Liberal Democrat Co-Chair, Dr Yee Wah Foo, an academic at the University of Lincoln.

Radio 4 recently interviewed Yee Wah about her research into the diaries left by her famous grandfather.

As Yee Wah commented in the radio interview, the diaries “tell the story of China’s emergence onto the diplomatic stage as the Second World War ended, and a colder kind of warfare began”.Grandfather Fu helped to professionalise China’s diplomatic service and managed to cement China’s place as a great power.It culminated significantly in the signing of the Moscow Treaty in 1943 by the four allies of the Second World War: Foreign Minister Hull for the US, Molotov for the USSR, Eden for the UK and Dr Fu Bingchang, Ambassador, for the Republic of China.

There were snippets of other interviews too such as with Johnny Foo, father of Yee Wah, who had described his own father as an old-style Confucian gentleman, “not too aggressive or too passive about anything”. Whilst other historians and academics lauded him as a “highly educated, cultured man with a wide range of interests” and a “skilled negotiator.”

Here Dr Yee Wah Foo’s interview here